All the talk this week about the tax problems experienced by the old Cafe Garzone on South Avenue left me thinking about this column, from 2008. Garzone's is across the street from St. Agnes Cemetery, not far from the Van Duyn Home & Hospital - once the site of the old Onondaga Sanatorium.

That facility was a treatment center for Central New Yorkers with tuberculosis - a potentially lethal disease that put many patients in the sanatorium for years. This column focuses on Marion Alderman, a Camillus woman who was treated in that building. The piece came to mind because Alderman, as she mentions in the column, recalled how sanatorium patients would sometimes sneak out late at night - and then go down a stone stairwell, through the cemetery and straight to Garzone's.
The sanatorium: Arch leads to local history

Nov. 11, 2008
Sean Kirst, columnist
The Post-Standard

Not long ago, my oldest boy and I were out for a run when we took a shortcut through St. Agnes Cemetery, in the Elmwood neighborhood of Syracuse. The cemetery rises above the valley, offering a great view of the city. We ran past what I can only call the "headless hillside, " a sad vista involving many statues rendered headless by vandals.

Because it was a nice day, and we were in no hurry, we decided to explore. A winding road stretched around the southwest corner of the cemetery, where we checked out some grand old tombstones on a bluff.

We paused, stunned, when we came upon an old stone arch.

Battered letters on the arch read, "Onondaga Sanatorium." Behind it, a broken stairway led up a steep hill. We could still see rusted pieces of a disintegrated railing.

Fascinated, my son and I ran up the trail. It led through the woods, past the ancient remains of some light standards. It turned and twisted until it brought us to the grounds of the Van Duyn Home & Hospital.

What we had, we realized, was a mystery.

I started making calls, although it took me awhile to learn the story. Van Duyn, it turned out, operates on the site of what used to be the Onondaga County sanitorium. For many decades in the 1900s, during a time when tuberculosis was still one of the leading causes of death in the United States, the sanitorium was a last hope for many patients from Central New York.

It was built at a place of high elevation, a place that provided fresh air for patients. The facility opened in 1916, according to accounts by local historians, as an urgent response to hundreds in greater Syracuse who had died from the disease. At its peak, it had hundreds of patients and a staff of almost 200 employees.

The records didn't mention the purpose of the trail.

To me, the possibilities were simple: Either it was put there to give patients a chance to exercise, or it was put there as a means of visiting tuberculosis patients who had gone to the cemetery -- permanently.

It turns out I was wrong, on both counts.

The answers came from Marion Morey Alderman, of Camillus, who spent years as a young woman in the sanitorium.

She remembered the trail. In an era before most families had a car, it was simply the fastest way of getting back and forth from the city.

"It was for workers and visitors," Marion said. "There wasn't the kind of bus service you have today. I remember there was a young girl up there (as a patient) whose parents were this little immigrant couple that spoke no English, and they'd always come to see her by climbing up the steps."

Marion was at the sanitorium for the better part of six years, from 1945 to 1951. She had been attending business school, not long after graduating from high school at Split Rock, when she began feeling exhausted. Once she started to hemorrhage, the doctors realized what was wrong:

Tuberculosis. They sent her to the sanitorium. Marion would eventually be transferred to another hospital at Ray Brook. Surgeons removed part of her rib cage. They collapsed her left lung. That was supposed to provide a cure.

It didn't work, at least not right away. Marion spent years recovering, with much of that time at Onondaga.

"I was probably one of the younger ones there," Marion said. "There were maybe 10 my age. We were all very close, and we received marvelous treatment. For most of the patients, the idea was that we were all in it together. You got through it because you saw others getting through it."

Marion said she was fortunate her illness never spread to her other lung. She stayed in the infirmary with other women, and she said there were at least two buildings that housed men. Many patients, she said, were classified as "chronics."

"They could never be released," Marion said. "Definitely, we would lose some people."

Cafe Garzone: When the Onondaga Sanitorium was filled with tuberculosis patients, some would sneak away for a beer at Garzone's. Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com

Faced with those realities, many patients used the stairway for another purpose. Marion recalls that there was a restaurant and nightclub called Garzone's on nearby South Avenue.

"I know some of the men, at night, would use the stairs to go over there and get a drink," Marion said.

While architectural pieces of the sanitorium survive, the operation eventually made way for Van Duyn, a hospital whose long-term future remains uncertain. "It is fully funded for 2009, and none of the options currently involve (its) closure," said Ann Rooney, county administrator for human services.

As for Marion, she stood a few weeks ago beneath the arch that reads "Sanatorium." She recalled her long and gradual recovery, how she finally became strong enough to marry and raise a family. But she was permanently changed by the years she spent in the building on the hill, a place that many others never got the chance to leave.